House Within a House

2023 Governor General's Literary Award for Literary Translation Finalist * 2023 VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award Winner * 2023 Winner John Glassco Prize for Literary Translation

A meditation on the wiles of depression, illuminated by queer and diasporic experience.

"We, nosotros, nosotras: somos sobrevivientes." Weaving prose poetry, essay, autobiography and photography in mutual contamination, Nicholas Dawson relates his own deep depression, a state never fully gone, always cohabitant. Amidst this persistence, "the body and the pen bring a plural syntax of alternative knowledges into being, one which allows us to know the world better, to know ourselves better, to better love daybreak and this sun obstinately piercing the curtain with its brazen rays."

House Within a House, in a luminous translation by D.M. Bradford, tells the story of what walls the depressed person in, what keeps them wandering inside, and what finally gets them, somehow, out of the house. The original book, Désormais, ma demeure, received the 2021 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal.